


Nott Forgotten

by vikkyleigh



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Caleb Widogast Needs a Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Spoilers for episode 111
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:01:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26667871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vikkyleigh/pseuds/vikkyleigh
Summary: I just can't get over the thought of Caleb making a beautiful mansion for all of his friends to sleep in and then going to sleep in his own personal torture chamber. I couldn't do it. I had  to change it somehow.Gen, but you could read it as Widowbrave if you really want to I guess.
Relationships: Nott | Veth Brenatto & Caleb Widogast
Comments: 7
Kudos: 124





	Nott Forgotten

The four-poster bed is lovely – soft and luxurious – but Veth isn’t sleepy. This morning she woke up with Yeza’s face next to her on the pillow for the first time in so long, the tropical sunlight slanting in through the window and Luc’s tiny body nestled warm and safe between them. In comparison this bed is lonely and over-large.

It also doesn’t help that she worked up a battles worth of anxiety and adrenaline over tonight’s dinner, and without the post-fight healing and exhaustion she finds herself still awake at two in the morning, staring blankly at the pillow and kneading her hands and feet mindlessly into the silken sheets. Her mind keeps turning over the events of the last few days like a child sifting through toys they’ve become bored of – nothing new to add, just picking each up and turning it over before moving on to the next.

Finally she gives it up, slipping out of bed with a sigh and tying on the little yellow-silk robe she’d found hanging on an eye-level hook. She fingers it lovingly for a moment, thinking of the nights Caleb spent sitting in his study in Xorhas, poring over notes he wouldn’t let her peek at. How much time and effort he must have spent making this place so perfect for each of them, adding all these fine details so catered to their specific tastes. She lets the tie of the robe drop smoothly between her fingers and allows herself a moment of guilt at the knowledge that this, by itself, is not enough to keep her with him.

But if she lets herself get too far down that track she’ll never get to sleep, and they may need her tomorrow. Instead she walks lightly through Luc’s room, suppressing another pang of loneliness, through the sitting room and through the well-stocked laboratory, dimly lit with globes of amber light. She is just going to check, very quietly, if Caleb is awake too. She knows if he isn’t she can slip away without him ever knowing she was there – that boy needs his sleep. But she has a hunch that he might not be, and tonight is a good night for being awake together.

The door on the far side of the lab leads, as she thought it might, to another sitting room. This one is dark, the fire unlit, and solid masses of human-sized furniture loom unwelcomingly. She pauses a moment to squint at the stained-glass window, but without light her vision goes to shades of gray and she can’t quite make out the picture it contains.

Pushing open the door to the next room, she isn’t quite sure what she expects to see – books, perhaps. Another library, or a more personalized laboratory with better paper. What she isn’t expecting is emptiness. The room is lined with heavy wood and nothing else. Even at her quietest, she feels like her footsteps are echoing in the oppressive silence. She pushes open the door to Caleb’s bedroom with something like relief and is hardly surprised to find it empty.

There is the same four-poster bed, the same brass tub steaming in the corner, but absent are the personal touches afforded everyone else. It looks impersonal, like the guest room Caleb showed them down below. The bed is unrumpled. It doesn’t even look like he came in long enough to take off his coat.

“Oh, Caleb,” she whispers into the silence. The room does not answer her.

She checks the library first, navigating the strange elevators in this tower with no small amount of apprehension, but it is empty. So is the dining room, the stained-glass room, and the strange party room Caleb had shown them on the second floor. She starts to wonder if maybe she is not the first person to seek him out – perhaps he is having a sleepover with Jester, or one of his late-night, overserious discussions with Fjord. But everyone else had seemed pretty tired, and she doesn’t _think_ Jester would invite Caleb to a sleepover without inviting her as well. Besides, the last Veth had seen of her Jester was a cat.

This gives her an idea, and she goes to one of the little ramps in the wall and shouts for a cat-butler. One appears after a few moments, fluffy and orange and spectral, but when she asks where Caleb is it only cocks its head to one side and stays silent.

“Did he tell you not to tell me?” she demands. The cat remains seated in front of her, staring quizzically as it waits for an order. “Oh, go on then,” she says after a moment. “Wait, actually, bring me a hot toddy.”

The cat reappears with her requested drink in less than a minute, and as she sips at it, she thinks. If she’s ruled out everywhere Caleb showed them, then where in Exandria could he have gone? Just about anywhere, she guesses, a little hysterically, but she doesn’t think he would have left the tower. Can he even do that, or would the tower just disappear like the dome?

It’s so like him, to create a wizard tower. A tower with nine sides – or Nein sides! That joke had been Caleb’s idea in the first place, and he certainly seems intent on taking it to its logical conclusion.

Veth stops drinking. She counts floors. She counts them again. She is, at last, fairly certain she knows where he is.

Back to her bedroom to get a copper wire, and she angles the spell up towards the ceiling. “Caleb, are you still awake? You can reply to this message.”

Nothing. She tries another angle. “Caleb, are you still up? Do you have more secret floors to the tower? You can reply to this message.”

A moment passes. She is starting to triangulate a new position when she hears the familiar voice, gravelly with sleep. “I, ah, I am awake now. What do you need?”

She recasts the spell. “Shit, sorry, I was just trying to see if you were awake. Why aren’t you in your room? Where are you? Why didn’t you—” the spell cuts her off before she can tell him to reply. The reply comes anyway.

“I will be, ah, down in a moment.” He sounds exhausted, and she wonders if she should have just let him sleep in whatever strange place he’s made, but her curiosity is stronger. She sits against the wall by her door, and after a few minutes an iris she hadn’t noticed opens in the ceiling above her and Caleb descends.

He looks haggard. He still hasn’t changed out of the fine black robes he wore to dinner with Trent, and his skin shines milk-pale in comparison. His hair hangs limp around his face, and his eyes are deeply shadowed. Veth decides she no longer feels guilty for waking him, since he clearly wasn’t having a restful sleep wherever-the-fuck he’d been.

“Where _were_ you?” she asks as his feet touch the ground. “Caleb, I can’t believe you made more secret floors to this tower and didn’t tell any of us! What if something had happened and we didn’t know where you were? What if –” He doesn’t acknowledge her rapid stream of questions, just steps heavily to the wall next to her and slides down. Knees to his chest, head in his hands. She falls silent.

He’s shaking, she realizes, putting her small hand on his shoulder. She can feel it through the thin fabric of his robe. His skin, as she puts her other hand carefully on his cheek, is ice-cold.

“… Caleb,” she asks softly, “what’s up there? What were you doing?”

For a moment, she thinks he will remain silent. But eventually he clears his throat. “A memory,” he answers at least, his face still mostly hidden from her. “I was remembering. There are things,” he pauses here, takes another breath, “things I cannot afford to forget.”

Veth feels sick to her stomach. He doesn’t have to tell her which memory – it’s clear that it wasn’t a good one, and her boy has more than enough bad from which to pick.

“Did you really have to remember them tonight?” she asks, after it becomes clear no more information will be forthcoming.

“I have to remember them _always._ ” The vehemence in his voice startles her as he finally lifts his head from his hands. It may be a trick of the magelight, but she thinks she can see tears glimmering in his eyes. “But tonight, of course, how could I forget?”

She waits, because this time it doesn’t seem like he’s finished. He takes a few ragged breaths and continues, his voice softer. “I am not a fool. I never truly thought that I could escape him, not really. Not forever. But I thought—” his voice breaks. “I _thought_ that I had broken free of him. I thought, at least, that I had ruined his plans for me. That I had won over him in this one thing. But _no!”_ His open palm strikes the floor, making Veth jump. “I _am_ a fool. Everything I have done has been playing into his hands. I have never stopped being the man he made of me, and now I’m not sure I ever can.” He is staring straight ahead now, and she can see the pain and anger in his eyes and the tears running down his stark-white cheeks.

“I’m not sure that’s true,” she says, and Caleb’s brow furrows, although he still doesn’t look at her. “Maybe he orchestrated your escape, but do you really believe he’s responsible for the person you are now?” She can see him gearing up to contradict her, so she presses on before he gets the chance. “He sure as hell didn’t plan for you to meet _me._ He can’t have planned all the things we’ve done – there’s no way he _knows_ about most of them. If you ask me,” she adds, her volume lowering as Caleb finally, finally turns to look at her, “He’s just an old dick trying to take credit for what you’ve done because he _knows_ you’re close to surpassing him. He can’t control you any other way now, so he’s resorting to mind games and you’re _letting_ him.”

Caleb makes a choked-off sound that could be a laugh or a sob. “ _Schatz,_ I hardly think I am _letting_ him do anything.”

Veth huffs out a breath in frustration. “But you _are_. By sitting around in a secret room being sad about the things he made you do, you’re letting him. Think about what Caduceus said, huh? It’s not pain that makes people. How many times have we said that without the rest of these people we’d still be running cons on the side of the road? Do you really think Trent planned to have you wander the countryside as a beggar for five years? Do you think he planned for you to be thrown in jail with a goblin? Do you _really_ think,” she pressed, meeting his eyes, “that he planned for us to meet the rest of the Nein? Do you think he planned for Molly to come into that tavern and invite us to the circus? I know he’s powerful, Caleb, but he isn’t a _god._ You know what made you into the man you are now, and it wasn’t him. There’s no way.”

Caleb is still shaking a little, tears still drying on his face. But he breathes along with her as she subsides from her outburst and manages something almost like a smile.

“You are right about one thing, at least,” he whispers at last. “I would not be who I am without you.”

“I’m right about all of it, and you know it,” says Veth, tangling a hand in his hair. The clock on the wall is chiming softly. Three AM. “Now I think it’s about time we went to bed, don’t you?”

It takes Caleb a moment to struggle to his feet, and she takes his hand and leads him like a child to his untouched bed. She watches as he sinks heavily into the bed, without even bothering to take off his shoes. After a moment’s consideration, she crawls up next to him.

“Budge over,” she whispers. He looks at her with a question in his eyes. It’s been some time since they shared a bed, if snuggling for warmth in the wild doesn’t count. “Why do you think I was up in the first place? I’m too used to sleeping with someone else around. My room is lovely, Caleb, but it was meant for two people.”

Words have been beyond him for a few minutes now, so she doesn’t expect an answer. But as she curls up into the warm, solid weight of him, his hand finds hers. Together, they sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> So apparently Grad school is like, a lot of work or something. I wrote this instead of multiple other things I should have been writing.  
> You know, I always kind of thought the fanfic trope of "Caleb makes the mansion with nice rooms for everyone and a shitty room for himself" was a little overdramatic but I clearly I was a fool. And Liam O'Brian is a monster.


End file.
